Motivational Quotes

Language

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

- Pancoast, Mal

Best Quotes about Language

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio

10.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

11.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

12.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

13.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

14.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

15.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

16.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

17.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

18.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

19.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

20.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

21.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

22.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

23.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

24.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

25.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

26.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

27.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

28.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

29.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

30.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

31.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

32.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

34.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

35.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

37.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

38.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

39.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

40.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

41.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

42.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

43.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

44.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

45.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

46.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

47.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

49.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin